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    The Patreon Collection, Volume 1
    The Patreon Collection, Volume 1
    The Patreon Collection, Volume 1
    Ebook240 pages3 hours

    The Patreon Collection, Volume 1

    By Stefon Mears

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    About this ebook

    A dozen paths to adventure. Each a short story to thrill and amaze.

    Every month Stefon Mears' Patreon supporters enjoy two new short stories. Stories never published anywhere before. Tales of adventure from deep space, across time, or from distant lands of magic. Tales of deadly monsters -- supernatural, or all too human. All from the twisted mind of Stefon Mears, author of the popular Rise of Magic and Ars Portlandia series.

    The Patreon Collection presents those stories, whole and unabridged, along with introductions to each story written just for this collection. Volume 1 includes the stories from January-June 2017.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThousand Faces Publishing
    Release dateSep 4, 2017
    ISBN9781386194736
    The Patreon Collection, Volume 1

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      Book preview

      The Patreon Collection, Volume 1 - Stefon Mears

      The Patreon Collection

      The Patreon Collection

      Volume 1

      Stefon Mears

      Thousand Faces Publishing

      Contents

      Foreword

      Only Sheepdog on the Moon

      The Final Survey of Andrei Kreutzmann

      The Fennigsan's Challenge

      The Face of Trouble

      The Undomesticated Strain

      Half a Pound of Magic

      Crawlspace

      Face Your Fears!

      Stone Dead

      Forty Years Among the Elves

      Refracted to the Stars

      Broken

      Sign Up for Stefon's Newsletter

      About the Author

      Also by Stefon Mears

      Foreword

      A good novel is like a big meal, from appetizers and beverage through the main course and dessert. A fully satisfying experience.

      Short stories are more like snacks.

      They aren’t the commitment of a full meal. They’re brief explosions of flavor that can be great on their own, but the best ones leave you wanting a little more. There’s an urge to grab them by a handful or two. You have go through a bunch of them to really satiate yourself, and you can have the distinct pleasure of varying the type and experience as you go.

      That’s one of the reasons I enjoy writing short stories. I get to play with all kinds of genres and ideas, without really committing myself to any of them. They can give me excuses to experiment with world-building, or different types of characters, or even pay tribute to a bygone era of fiction that helped form the foundation for the stories we read and write today.

      This is why I write a lot of short stories.

      More than I could reasonably send around to professional magazines and anthologies without the editors begging mercy for their staffs.

      This is where Patreon came in.

      Patreon offered me the opportunity to do two things I really wanted to do: connect with my readers, and send my short stories right to them. It meant my readers could be sure of having Stefon Mears stories to read between novels, and it meant that I had someplace meaningful to send my short stories.

      It’s a terrific time to be a writer. And a reader, for that matter.

      But once my stories went out to my patrons, I didn’t want to just let them sit fallow on my hard drive. Besides, not every reader wants to become a patron.

      The Patreon Collection seemed like the most natural idea in the world. Gather those Patreon stories a dozen at a time, and publish them wide, for the whole world to enjoy.

      And now they are in your hands. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

      Only Sheepdog on the Moon

      A couple of years ago, I got to talk with an ex-soldier about the military, and how he saw the difference between the soldier’s mindset and the civilian’s mindset. He had a great deal to say. His comments would probably take a collection of its own to begin to do them justice. But one image he conveyed was that the soldier is a sheepdog, protecting civilians from the wolves of the world.

      This story came about because I was thinking about that image, and about the sort of person who wouldn’t let a little thing like retirement stand between himself and duty. Not when the wolves came calling.

      Only Sheepdog on the Moon

      Cole Douglas finished his afternoon jog through the scrub grass of the foothills. Half-assed job they did of terraforming Ganymede back during the great Deuterium Rush thirty years ago. Even the sky never got more than pale blue, which Cole blamed for his heavy breathing after only ten miles. Thin air from the bad terraforming, not age starting to rear its ugly head. Air didn't even taste fresh from last night's rain. It had that cloying little tang like he was around mold.

      Besides, Cole was only fifty, not an old man yet.

      Hands on his hips he walked in circles. No good going back to the bar sucking air like he was. Couldn't let the locals think he'd gone soft. Never hear the end of it then. Not that any of them had a right to point fingers about going soft. They liked their safe isolation on an ignored moon well inside Earth-controlled space, but not one of them ever served in the forces that maintained that safety. Much less faced five wars over twenty-five years and retired a full captain like Cole.

      But he didn't mind a little teasing. They valued their privacy like he did, so none of them ever asked stupid questions about his service. They knew him as the bartender, and that was the way Cole liked it.

      An orange flash high in the sky drew Cole's attention. He shaded his eyes and tried to look closer, but it was gone. Looked like an atmospheric entry, but the color was wrong and it was nowhere near the right trajectory to come near the little landing field the locals laughingly called their spaceport. He couldn't even hear a hint of its engines, just the three-note trill of a nearby spar-owl.

      Could be low on fuel, he thought. Must be a first-timer.

      Cole made his way down from the scrub and across the pale dirt toward the converted shuttlecraft that served as his bar. From the outside it looked like a bright red egg standing sideways on crab's legs. Cole grabbed a sharp rock and gave another halfhearted scrape at the Richardson Aeronautics logo, still mostly legible on the side. Cole called his bar The Final Resting Place. The locals just called it Richard's.

      Cole scrambled up one of the crab legs to the cockpit up front where the egg tapered. He punched in his lock code and the canopy popped open, letting him into his sanctum sanctorum. Cole had only needed the controls that handled lights, power and comfort for the shuttle, so he had torn out most of the others to make room for his bunk and the hull-metal service chests that stored his clothes, books, vids and mementos. But Cole did keep the transmitter functioning, a superstitious fear going back to his days as a green private when the platoon transmitter got hit and...

      Cole shook his head. That was all behind him now. He stripped for a quick chemical shower and came out smelling like cheap aftershave, too much musk and too little character.

      He dressed in the spacer standard flexcotton long-sleeved shirt and slacks, his bright blue and dull grey, respectively. He entered the kitchen and supply area, converted from the former passenger cabin. He ignored the lingering grease smell from last night's sausages and fakeeggs and threw some prefabs in the heater so any early customers would have at least something to chew on. He was running low on local beer. That Henderson better not be late with his drop tomorrow.

      Cole flicked on the lights in the main bar – once the cargo bay – and checked the levels of the bottles behind the converted chunk of hull he'd salvaged from that wreck an hour south from the 'port. Those all looked good, so even a run on beer wouldn't leave him dry. By reflex he also checked his old service weapon, an FMA 387 Hard Beam Rifle, kept under the bar. He kept the weapon ready for duty, though he never needed it, unlike the chunk of ship antenna he used as a club.

      All ready, he flipped the switch to open the cargo bay doors and crossed between the bolted down tables and collapsible chairs to kick down the emergency ladder. He never lowered the cargo ramp, and the locals never asked him to.

      An hour later, Cole was laughing along with a handful the locals about a tour ship that came through last summer. The crowd that night was all-human, as usual. Officially Earth Gov. got on well enough with most of its neighboring sapients, but none of them ever asked to settle in Earth-controlled space.

      So the crowd was a typical spread of a dozen locals near the bar, and close to twenty travelers near the back, usually smugglers and the sort who liked the way Ganymede thumbed its nose at government. Even the local governor hated reporting in to Earth, and ignored the regulation to maintain a standing militia. Who needed a militia when Earth had a military that covered a fifth of the Milky Way?

      Cole didn't like breaking regs, but it wasn't his call to make.

      Any of you see that entry today? asked Cole, interrupting old Zed's wide-eyed depiction of a rich, confused tourist. Way off north, like the pilot doesn't even know where to land.

      That got a little laugh out of the locals, but the travelers all looked up. One of them, a gruff looking kid with a scar, even if he was barely old enough to buy Cole's drinks, said, I saw it. Snake-head orange.

      Two of the tables of travelers emptied, their occupants hustling down the ladder fast enough to get a smirk or two out of the locals.

      No way it's the Sarkaanans, said Zed. There's a cease-fire.

      The kid shrugged and went back to drinking, but the travelers all grumbled among themselves like they agreed and needed to adjust their plans. Cole did remember something about new Sarkaanan engines burning orange, but it had to have been a trick of the thin atmosphere. Earth did have a cease-fire with Sarkaan. On the other hand, no one who moved to Ganymede tried to stay on top of the news.

      Cole decided it was probably nothing, and distracted everyone by making up a story about how the Sarkaanans were coming to buy jinda weed from the governor.

      By the time Cole ran the last drunks out of the bar for the night, he couldn't get the orange flash out of his head. He closed up the cargo bay and did something he hadn't done in a year-and-a-half, Earth standard time: fired up his transmitter. A quick call to the base on Europa would assuage any lingering fears.

      The transmitter was a simple voice-only model that had controls like 'power,' 'volume' and 'frequency.' Little to go wrong and little to break. But when Cole fired it up, he only got static. On every channel.

      That wasn't right.

      Cole popped the canopy and crawled on top of the ex-shuttle, but he found the antenna dish intact and in apparent working order. A quick test even showed power and normal response.

      That old pre-combat flutter started deep in Cole's gut, tightened his balls, made his neck feel exposed and cold. The system check was clean. If Cole could get no signal, someone was jamming them.

      Cole slid down the hull and into the cockpit. Jamming meant attack was imminent. He locked the canopy behind him, then stopped. If this was an attack, the Sarkaanans would cut through the locals without effort. Cole couldn't bring himself to hide in his bar and leave the sheep for the wolves.

      Cole grabbed his hard beam rifle from behind the bar, double-checked its charge, and ran for the landing field. Three of the traveler ships had already left but four still had their landing gear down and showed no signs of running. Not that they had any visible weapons either. They couldn't without Earth Corps stopping them for every little infraction. Cole ran in front of cockpits, waving his arms and shouting, until each ship had someone willing to come talk to him. Four hard looking, dirty, spacer types. Well, three, plus the scarred kid from earlier.

      We're being jammed, said Cole.

      Snake-heads coming. We know, said a woman with short-cropped black hair and engine grease on her face. Lookin' for a ride out?

      I'm looking for help. You use our field, drink in my bar, sell to the locals. Well now we need you.

      They laughed. Well, the kid didn't laugh, but he did look down and shake his head. They all headed back for their ships, the kid a little slower than the others.

      Wolves, thought Cole. Nothing but a bunch of lousy wolves when I need sheepdogs.

      There's just me.

      Something cold and fatalistic settled into Cole then. The enemy was coming and he was the only one who could do anything about it, the only gun between the locals and the enemy. But he couldn't face them, not in civvies.

      If Cole was going to his death, he needed a uniform.

      Cole double-timed it back to his cockpit, where the only pieces of old uniform he could find were his garrison cap and combat boots. Not enough. Cole dug through his trunks until he found his ancestral kilt, the Douglas family tartan, black-and-gray version. He donned the kilt, boots and cap, picked up his hard beam rifle, and went out to face the enemy.

      The night sky of Ganymede glowed with reflections from nearby Io, Europa and Jupiter, more like Earth twilight than the night sky Cole's ancestors knew. Based on the afternoon entry flare, if the Sarkaanans approached, they did so from the north, past the foothills. But Cole jogged these foothills every day, had done so for five years. No one knew them better than he did.

      Cole ran for two minutes to the east before turning north, sticking to a secondary ridge to hide his silhouette from the night sky.

      Ten minutes out he saw and heard nothing.

      Twenty minutes out still nothing.

      Thirty minutes out he smelled Sarkaanan.

      Cole's last tour included six months on the Sarkaanan front and remembered well their dried shrimp and ammonia scent. Cole closed his eyes to listen harder, and could just make out sibilant tones and what sounded like their language. He dropped to the scrub grass, its harsh texture scratching up his knees and calves as he belly crawled toward the sound.

      Cole crested the rise of the nearest high top and there they were tucked into a pocket between hills: four Sarkaanans, a ship, and a land-based antenna pack that Cole figured was the source of the jamming. The ship was a ten-meter-long dull orange tube in the shape of a lazy 's', tapering at the front and back. The aliens themselves looked like upright monitor lizards two meters tall (plus another meter of tail), packing those long rifles his last platoon had dubbed 'Martini-Smiths' because the firing end looked like a martini glass and no one wanted to make enough 's' sounds to pronounce the real name.

      But these Sarkaanans wore no uniforms. They dressed in standard spacer clothes of pale green and dark green, nothing like their official burnt orange garb.

      That made Cole realize he had already trained his hard beam rifle on the biggest one. He pulled his finger off the trigger. What if they were travelers? Ganymede was a place for travelers. Maybe they didn't mean any harm at all. Maybe they were armed because they expected a hostile welcome...

      One of them held up a small remote device. The other three looked at the device, then back at the ship. The leader – or at least Cole assumed the one with the remote was the leader – pushed a button, and Cole saw dim flashes along the ship, followed by sounds like pillows slamming against the floor, followed by hints of concussion, just enough to feel like puffs of air on Cole's face. When the show finished, the ship had collapsed in on itself.

      The Sarkaanans had blown their ship. This was a one-way trip for them. Not travelers then. Uniforms or no, they were here to commit an act of war.

      What Cole wouldn't have given for a grenade.

      Before he even fell flat to the ground, Cole shot the leader, a flare of pale green and a scent of ozone before the hard beam burned a hole through the enemy's chest. One down.

      The other three dove for cover, slithering toward big rocks with a speed and grace that would have made their ancestors proud. Cole got off another shot, but it went wide right.

      Cole did some rolling himself, tucking his rifle flat to his chest and trying to move far enough left that they might not be able to meaningfully return fire. At least not yet.

      He stopped after about five meters and took a moment to re-orient himself. No immediate sighting of the enemy, but fewer than a half-dozen rocks big enough to hide behind. No sign of returned fire yet either, which meant they knew or guessed that Cole had moved and were waiting to see his next muzzle flash.

      Seconds ticked by. Cole had high ground, but they had superior numbers and superior cover. If he let them wait him out, the morning light would make him an easy target.

      Speaking of easy targets...

      Cole pulled the trigger and burned a hole in the jammer, silencing a deep background hum he hadn't realized he'd heard. Immediately he heard the response puffs from the Martini-Smiths. One ball went wide left, but another shattered less than a meter away, splashing acid that hit Cole's face.

      Cole bit through part of his cheek trying not to scream as he squeezed his eyes tight closed and wiped his cheek on a

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